Monitoring & Management on No JitterMonitoring & Managementhttps://www.nojitter.com
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enSun, 07 Jun 2020 04:22:20 -0500http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specificationMeasuring the Quality of Collaboration Sessionshttps://www.nojitter.com/team-collaboration-tools-workspaces/measuring-quality-collaboration-sessions
With more people working from home because of COVID-19, collaboration traffic has surged, often bringing with it session quality issues. It goes without saying; poor sessions are annoying, take too long, and are just frustrating. To learn how an enterprise can measure and evaluate their collaboration sessions quality, I contacted Jonathan Sass, head of product management at Vyopta, for some answers. Vyopta generates operational and business insights to improve the user experience, increase adoption, and improve the ROI of an enterprise’s technology investments.

How has collaboration video traffic changed since this time last year?

Previously, meeting usage at organizations was tripling every 24 months. Since the beginning of the pandemic, it has skyrocketed. Among our customer base, the total number of meeting participants has gone up by roughly 500% in a matter of weeks.

Are there any specific industries that are seeing a high level of collaboration traffic?

We have seen growth across all industries largely due to the fact that most employees have been forced to work remotely. However, two industries have seen fundamental changes in video meeting use cases, outside of remote work. Healthcare has been forced to accelerate telehealth programs to serve patients, introducing a large volume of video meetings that didn’t exist a year ago. Similarly, universities and K-12 organizations had to offer distance learning through video conferencing.

Has the growth in traffic impaired the user experience?

We have seen the quality of video meetings deteriorate during the pandemic period for users on both cloud and premises-based platforms. In addition, we are seeing evidence that call failures and abandonment (users having to dial back in) has increased over this timeframe as well. It can be seen that UCaaS experienced a more significant proportion of the bad quality call experiences for conferencing/meetings than on-premises technologies. The increase started in mid-March but has continued to increase through mid-May. This data on UCaaS aggregates data from multiple platforms, including Zoom, WebEx, and BlueJeans.

The call failure chart below illustrates the growing proportion of call disconnects/failures compared to the increase in meeting participants since January. The higher rates of call abandonment indicate that a call was dropped, or a user was disconnected, therefore had to call back into the conference.

The large increase in March in abandonment (failure) rates likely indicates that enterprises, UCaaS vendors, and telecom providers/services had issues keeping up with the needed capacity to sustain the large surge in users. Organizations, vendors, providers are taking steps to address these issues, but it’s not in that all-clear yet.

What about the size of the meetings? Since more people are in remote collaboration, are there more participants in meetings, and does that change collaboration performance?

There has been a definite increase in large-sized meetings. While the overall breakdown of meetings by size remains proportionally similar to before COVID-19, there has been a significant increase in meetings of larger sizes. The number of meetings with six or more people has risen in number, meetings above 10 even more, and meetings above 21 even more. The largest jump is for meetings above 50 participants, which indicates large scale events and departmental and company meetings are being held online.

Has the traffic growth been mostly over the Internet? Has this changed the performance?

There has certainly been growth of on-premises deployments where end users securely connect back into corporate infrastructure, but by far, the majority of growth has shifted to the Internet. It has most definitely impacted performance. Most companies have a hard time isolating whether issues and quality degradations are due to the enterprise network, cloud services, the telecom service provider, or the users’ home network and setup.

Is more bandwidth the only answer to performance issues?

Bandwidth is certainly a factor. Internet service is quite expensive in the U.S., compared to other parts of the world, and since there are only a few providers, there is less competition. You do not get much for the price you pay. Download speeds are usually decent, but upload speeds, which is very important for UC traffic, aren’t.

In addition to the bandwidth concerns, most family homes have several people accessing the Internet at the same time, for multiple jobs, distance learning lessons, streaming services, etc. Several people in a house can quickly use up the download and the upload speed.

Many workers don’t have their own home office setup for remote work and frequent virtual meetings. Many users might have access to better hardware in video and audio devices at the office but are now left to whatever devices they may have at home which is likely not as good. Some headsets are better than others, but devices and peripherals have a tremendous impact on user experience and meeting productivity. Many people’s home Internet routers are years old and not often upgraded. If a router is many years old, it often will not be able to handle increased traffic. I recently discovered that my old router was cutting my Internet speeds in half.

Can computers influence the session quality?

Computers can also impact performance with much of the traffic moving to cloud providers, calls, and meetings happen via software. Old PCs can have problems running video and audio calls due to CPU and memory constraints, which can impact the quality of the call. Cloud provider capacity is also impacting performance. The increased load on cloud UC providers has caused performance issues that affect everyone.

How can a performance tool be used?

A performance management solution can be used by IT teams in multiple ways and generally helps them scale to support a large collaboration environment and a large set of users.

First, it can be used to proactively detect quality issues, performance degradation, and call failure issues. Having a unified solution that acts as a single pane of glass across all the technologies in an organization’s collaboration environment helps to more accurately detect and diagnose issues. Also, IT teams can leverage such a tool to troubleshoot issues with live and past calls and bring real data to collaborators to help accelerate resolution.

Second, a good performance management tool can also provide historical analysis that can provide business insights and help improve operational planning. For example, such analytics can help to identify whether an issue isn’t isolated, but rather a systemic, recurring one, along with identifying causes for corrective actions. Also, capacity metrics and information about total and peak concurrent usage needs can aid IT teams to intelligently throttle licensing, bridging, and trunk capacity. Information about how users are engaging with meetings and how they are joining audio across different departments and locations helps IT to set the right standards and user education, so that participants are prepared to have the best possible experience.

With regards to remote work scenarios for companies relying on premises-hosted UC, IT teams often have no visibility into quality metrics for remote users who join from their homes using software clients, phones, and endpoints that are registered to premises-based systems, making it difficult to diagnose whether issues lie with the telecom provider, the home network, or enterprise infrastructure. Increased traffic and concurrent usage also burden the edge of the enterprise-hosted UC network, which if not managed adequately, and can lead to capacity failures and users being unable to place calls. Vyopta provides complete visibility on status, availability, and quality passing through edge nodes such as expressways and session border controllers (SBCs), ultimately helping IT teams to improve UC experience and adoption amongst remote workers.

How does Vyopta measure the performance of collaboration sessions? Are there metrics you measure and use to calculate performance, and if so, how are the metrics analyzed?

Vyopta collects data directly from multiple elements along end-to-end call and meeting paths, whether they are deployed on-premises or in the cloud. These elements span enterprise infrastructure, edge nodes, cloud-based services, software clients and devices, and even trunks to external telecom providers. By amalgamating this data along a call’s path into a single unified platform (for example from the premises-registered endpoint, the edge expressway, and the call control and bridging platforms), Vyopta gathers different perspectives on the quality for a given meeting and thus provides a richer environment for troubleshooting as well as identifying recurring, systemic issues.

For a given call leg, Vyopta tracks raw quality metrics including latency, bitrate, frame rate, jitter, packet loss, and tracks each of these for transmit and receive connections for audio, video, and presentation share modes. Vyopta also looks at availability and status of devices. This data is normalized across the Vyopta interface, and a proprietary quality score is generated.

IT teams can then choose to be alerted on availability as well as performance degradations based on the quality score itself, the individual metrics, or a set of custom thresholds and parameters.

]]>Team Collaboration Tools & WorkspacesAnalyticsCloud CommunicationsEnterprise NetworkingMonitoring & Managementundefinedsite:License Global,nid:17250Fri, 05 Jun 2020 00:00:00 -0500Gary AudinLicense GlobalNews &amp; Viewsenhttps://www.nojitter.com/team-collaboration-tools-workspaces/measuring-quality-collaboration-sessionsManaging Force Majeure Clauses: Fine Print Does Matterhttps://www.nojitter.com/organization-management/managing-force-majeure-clauses-fine-print-does-matter
A current joke making the rounds reads: “2020 is a unique leap year: it has 29 days in February, 300 days in March, and [five] years in April and May.” This may be particularly true for enterprise end users who find themselves stuck in undesirable vendor agreements where contracted services aren’t meeting promises or expectations, and customers can’t do a whole lot about it. Isn’t that what force majeure provisions are for? The answer is a qualified “maybe.”

Maybe because of my legal training or having been on the bad side of a signed (but not read or understood) vendor agreements, I definitely sweat the small stuff. By small stuff, I mean the contractual language that’s often found in the teensiest print on one of the back pages buried in boilerplate agreements that vendors provide. Alternatively, it may be posted in some obscure URL far below a vendor’s landing page. In any case, it’s important to not only read the actual language but to read it in context of the other terms in the agreement because these provisions can become very important when things go awry.

In the case of many tough circumstances, it’s only when things go wrong that the terms of those long-buried agreements become important. Given the COVID-19 reality we now live in, force majeure provisions are the most important type of vendor language, which may—and the keyword here is may— provide some sort of contractual relief.

The phrase force majeure actually means “superior force.” In legalese, it’s a circumstance that prevents performance. There was a windstorm that took out power to the provider’s operations center, thus rendering performance impossible. This is not the provider’s fault, but for the time being, the vendor can’t provide the service that it has contracted to provide. Legally, at least in New York, case law dictates that “the burden of demonstrating force majeure is on the party seeking to have its performance excused, … and the non-performing party must demonstrate its efforts to perform its contractual duties despite the occurrence of the event that it claims constituted force majeure.” (Rochester Gas & Elec. Corp. v. Delta Star, Inc., No. 06-CV-6155-CJS-MWP, 2009 WL 368508, at *7 {W.D.N.Y Feb. 13, 2009}). This is all well and good, but it’s very likely that, while the provider is contractually excused from providing the service, as a result of an event that’s beyond its control, the customer is not excused from payment for that service, even though it’s receiving no—or substandard— service. Under these circumstances, they’re excused from providing the service and you, the customer, are still obligated to pay.

That’s right. Cue flashing lights here. These clauses are rarely mutual. Just because the provider can’t provide the service, the customer is likely still on the hook to pay for the service — even though the service is not being delivered.

More specifically, to invoke the clause, it’s imperative that necessary steps be taken as laid out in the original agreement. Subtleties in these agreement sections are worth careful consideration before signing. Also, be advised that the obligation to pay or not pay is usually not found in the force majeure section but buried elsewhere in the agreement. Another point worth noting for sure.

These are the take always. First, read the small print. It does matter. Secondly, not all force majeure provisions are the same, but they are often so slanted against the customer/end user that they become a term worth negotiating. In fairness, since most customers don’t raise these questions with their respective account teams, it’s not fair to expect the sales force to understand these subtleties. But they are worth making a fuss about because they do matter.

]]>Organization & ManagementManaged ServicesMonitoring & ManagementRegulationcontractssite:License Global,nid:17241Fri, 29 May 2020 00:00:00 -0500Martha BuyerLicense GlobalNews &amp; Viewsenhttps://www.nojitter.com/organization-management/managing-force-majeure-clauses-fine-print-does-matterThe Dreadful State of Cloud Documentation and Educationhttps://www.nojitter.com/cloud-communications/dreadful-state-cloud-documentation-and-education
Legacy is a term used rather inaccurately in our industry. When applied as an adjective, it’s supposed to mean, “denoting or relating to software or hardware that has been superseded but is difficult to replace because of its wide use.” When often used by cloud providers, the term infers “premises-based, old, outdated, and irrelevant” technology. I would reasonably argue, that the “so-called” legacy vendors had it right in many areas. The cloud vendors could learn a lot from their predecessors, especially in the areas of quality documentation and education.

Quality documentation admittingly is tough to write; as a technical education facilitator, I prefer instruction over documentation writing because I can elaborate or demonstrate a topic or concept in different ways for comprehension. I can draw out a diagram or flow chart, use different analogies, and demonstrate using the actual application. Furthermore, I can see the participants’ response, understanding, or lack thereof, by asking questions, requesting chats or opening up for dialogue in a virtual setting.

The document writer, who usually has never taught the application or sat in for instruction, ends up writing documentation based on developers’ notes and testing the application. They often don’t know there tends to be more than one way to design a contact routing scheme, and the impact of doing it in different variations may have on the statistics available for reports or other nuances that the application may have. That knowledge and experience is gained over time, in multiple customer implementations with different business requirements; each question asked during a course or implementation has the instructor or designer thinking about the flexibility the application has or doesn’t have to meet the customer needs. The lack of a feature spurs on requests for enhancements in future releases.

The problem with documentation is that it requires completion before the product or application is made available. Or at least this should be done before the release is published. With the timely delivery of new features or releases, documentation and training have often become an afterthought to many cloud providers. The “plug and play” concept also seems to downplay the requirement for quality documentation or education. Documentation can always be enhanced and improved if made a priority.

Here's one example where some cloud documentation could be enhanced. Most contact center applications require an agent to log in with a username. The definition of that field by one vendor in their documentation is:

Username—The name that a person should use to log into the environment. You must specify a value for this property, and that value must be unique within the configuration database.

That seems straightforward. Yet, the explanation says nothing about whether this field is case sensitive, if special characters are required, how long the username field is, and so forth. In this same document, there are no screenshots of the agent parameters within the application to guide the user. If the individual is trying to use the documentation to add a new agent, they may have to guess how to enter the information. Now, the vendor probably has online help, but that digital assistance should match what’s in their downloadable PDF document.

When I recently queried two cloud vendors, I noticed a lack of documentation when I asked about their data dictionary. This significant document for data and reporting analysts usually contains the database design and data element definitions of the historical reporting and real-time parameters contained within the contact center application, including examples of any standard reporting in the system. The data dictionary would define what the equation is for service level, or whether talk time by definition includes the time the customer is put on hold, and so forth.

One vendor said its data dictionary was located only online, element-by-element viewing, but wasn’t available for download in a PDF file. Another echoed something similar but added it didn’t want “customers printing paper and negatively impacting the environment.” First of all, a PDF document doesn’t need to be printed; they’re great for perusing information, highlighting, and making notes. The decision to print should rely on the customer, and I thought that was a lazy excuse for not providing it. What’s even more irritating is this vendor provided the data dictionary documentation for releases one to three in PDF form, but didn’t for its fourth product release. It seems to me that a vendor not willing to put documentation in a printable form is trying to hide something. As a consultant when I am evaluating a vendor for customers, documentation and good training carry a lot of weight. This vendor has lost many points in my book by their silly response and lack of continued documentation.

Now, just a few of my observations on the training provided by some contact center cloud providers. First of all, I’m amazed that most of them are offering education during the implementation phase, and require many of their customers to implement a fair amount of their own design or else there are extra professional services costs. That may work for some customers, but for many, time is critical and on-the-job (OTJ) training during implementation isn’t optimal.

Course instruction seems to be in lacking strong environments and instructors with experience. I observed this when sitting in on a customer onsite, in-person led course, where the instructor showed us all the various parts of the application, but no documentation was provided or referred to, and no practice exercises or tests were made to see if it actually worked that way it was stated. When I asked my customer if the other course module was better, they said it was a different, more experienced instructor teaching, yet no reference to documentation once again, more of a show and tell. Even if there is good documentation for the system, an instructor usually provides some supplemental material and has practice exercises to instill the knowledge.

Virtual instructor-led learning is offered for most vendors today, and onsite courses are becoming rare for obvious reasons. Virtual instructor-led learning definitely has its advantages and its place. But as we get into the more complex applications of contact routing, the importance of testing designs, and trying different scenarios, often the virtual environment lacks the ideal set up for good robust testing. I’ve found that the contact routing courses, and overall administration set up and design is often best taught in the traditional in-person classroom with proper documentation, demonstration, and practice exercises for participants to test and try. Often, participants will ask me the questions; instead of jumping to give them the answer, I have them test it out themselves on the system and work with other students to verify their findings.

There are all sorts of learners out there. I’m one who likes to learn from the “expert” without distraction; my experience of teaching virtual classes, participants are still checking emails and being distracted by other work. Whether you’re at home or in the office, people still believe you’re available and interrupt. Being away from home and office provides the time and space for learning the more complex aspects of the application.

Customers spend lots of money and time putting in various cloud contact center applications and with the good implementation, documentation and training customers could get a lot more value out of their investment.

]]><a href="/event-type/enterprise-connect" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Enterprise Connect</a>Cloud CommunicationsDigital WorkplaceManaged ServicesMonitoring & ManagementTechnology TrendsVendor Strategysite:License Global,nid:17146Wed, 22 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0500Cheryl HelmLicense GlobalNews &amp; Viewsenhttps://www.nojitter.com/cloud-communications/dreadful-state-cloud-documentation-and-educationRemote Team Management: Done Righthttps://www.nojitter.com/sctc/remote-team-management-done-right
Work-from-home is no longer an option. With the coronavirus (COVID-19) shelter-in-place order, this strategy is vital to business continuity and compliance. Contact center software vendors have done a great job responding to the pandemic by offering turnkey cloud solutions to customers, and in some cases, for free. But, there is a big disconnect between implementing a solution and operationalizing the processes to support working remotely. As I’ve been getting tapped to write operational processes for newly formed remote teams, I researched companies that successfully manage remote teams for guidance and relied on experts in human resources.

Many organizations already have a telecommuting policy and procedures that allow employees to work at home or some other off‐site location for all or some of their regularly scheduled work hours. Most policies include eligibility requirements, such as employee tenure and past performance. But, COVID-19 requires modification to those agreements to provide greater flexibility to adjust to the ever-changing situation. Technology, equipment, a home safety checklist, and approval processes have all become streamlined to accommodate a quick setup for remote agents.

Taking a page from companies that successfully manage and run 100% remote teams, new processes are critical to support remote team management. Right now may be the first time managers have had to lead teams remotely. While employees are still expected to do their job, clarifying tasks and processes is important to ensure everyone understands who does what and when. Clear communications and effective meeting management are the basics of good management regardless of where the work gets done.

Monitoring team members’ activities and keeping track of work progress remains unchanged, but data transparency is important to keep remote teams aligned. Workforce management monitors workers as if they’re on the desk right next to you. Quality monitoring tools that include using screen capture, and recordings, go beyond productivity and efficiency of the agents. They ensure that calls are being handled properly. Real-time dashboards and scheduled reports provide all the data needed despite working in separate locations. This information needs to be shared, published, and communicated, now more than ever.

Finally, putting extra effort into building a culture of accountability through trust is key. Working remote means trusting your employees to do their jobs and giving them the support they need to do it right. Allow your remote workers to discuss the aspects of their new work life, address those concerns, and build a feedback loop for organizational transparency. Help them feel more connected to their work, the team, and the organization, and we will get through this together.

Stay safe, stay healthy, and stay connected.

SCTC Perspective" is written by members of the Society of Communications Technology Consultants, an international organization of independent information and communications technology professionals serving clients in all business sectors and government worldwide.

]]><a href="/event-type/enterprise-connect" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Enterprise Connect</a>SCTCCloud CommunicationsDigital WorkplaceEmployee ExperienceMonitoring & ManagementOrganization & ManagementTeam Collaboration Tools & Workspacestelecommutingremote workCOVID-19site:License Global,nid:17113Wed, 08 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0500Frances HornerLicense GlobalNews &amp; Viewsenhttps://www.nojitter.com/sctc/remote-team-management-done-rightHow to Manage A Cloud Collaboration Solution Effectivelyhttps://www.nojitter.com/team-collaboration/how-manage-cloud-collaboration-solution-effectively
Managing a cloud-based collaboration solution is a different proposition than managing an in-house infrastructure. It’s more like managing a managed service with the service provider having a very different view of how to manage you (e.g., more automation, less interaction), so some adjustments are in order.

The ultimate goal of IT is making sure your enterprise is getting the service they need, which means ensuring that the service isn't only available but providing a quality experience. By analyzing when a service is on/off-line, measuring the quality of experience, and working with providers customer success teams, you can effectively manage your vendor and make sure your enterprise is getting the services that they need.

Solution Availability

Measuring how often a solution isn’t available can easily be done through the existing enterprise ticketing system. Users call your help desk when the solution isn’t available, a ticket is opened, and then the ticket is closed when the system comes back on-line. Measuring the duration of time between when a ticket was opened and closed gives you the rough availability of the solution. Tickets can also be used to determine if availability is site- or geography-related, as the tickets will specify what is and isn’t working and will be raised in the geography where users complain.

The vendor will also supply information about their uptime on a customer-facing portal or blog site. This can be useful in reviewing how often and what types of outages occur and will also show outages that weren’t detected by users (e.g., a failure at midnight isn’t detected until users start work at 7:00 AM).

I recommend tracking this information monthly, and reviewing it monthly or quarterly with the vendor and with the network team as appropriate. Just letting the vendor know you are tracking this metric will help push them in the right direction.

Quality of Experience

Having a solution available and having a solution that users want to use are two different things. The quality of the user experience is critical to the uptake of the technology, and thus to the promised increase in productivity and resulting ROI. Some of the issues of quality of experience (QoE) are under the service provider’s control, but some of them belong to the enterprise or the network providers.

The four phases of a collaboration call are:

Scheduling

Call Initiation (joining)

In-call experience

Follow-up

Tracking the experience of users in each phase provides insight into how hard or easy it is to use the solution, and thus the likelihood that they will continue to do so and will recommend the service to colleagues.

Scheduling done right is as easy as using a plug-in within your standard calendaring tool (e.g., Outlook) to add collaboration information into a meeting. Making scheduling of a collaboration call as easy as scheduling a one-on-one or a meeting in a local conference room is important to ensure rapid technology uptake. Some enterprises are using higher-level scheduling tools for building facilities that include guest welcoming services, catering, room scheduling, and management of information panels outside of the conference room. It’s critical at the design stage to make these systems as transparent or as integrated as possible. If users have to bounce back and forth between two different systems to schedule a collaboration session (meeting rooms on one system and personnel on another), they often give up and just go to a phone bridge or something else.

Analytics don’t help very much here. Most managers are using the solution and thus have direct experience with how hard or easy it is to use. For the most direct feedback, ask your executive administrators as they are likely doing the most complex scheduling and will have pointed feedback on what does and doesn’t work well.

Call initiation should be as simple as clicking on a link (desktop or mobile) or one touch on a touch screen (for room systems). If this part of the solution is not working well, feedback will come from direct experience or user feedback.

In-call experience is a component that can be directly monitored through tools, and I recommend some investment here to make sure you have ongoing insight into this aspect. Vendors will often provide an analytics portal that gives information about the use of their solution. The easy metrics are numbers of meetings and minutes in meetings, which is helpful to determine adoption rates but otherwise not very helpful.

A call history report with information on time-of-day, the location of the users, type of call, and call modalities used (audio, video, content sharing) can provide insightful metrics into the quality of calls. Additionally, as much information as possible about the network connectivity of those users, including how they are connected (direct, WiFi, or cellular) and their location, is useful. The vendor may also be able to provide network analytics for the call including packet loss, jitter, and latency. Knowing to which service provider data center or PoP they connect is also critical to good analysis. This information gives you the ability to discover which components of the solution (endpoints, network, vendor) and which components of the network (local connect, enterprise LAN, enterprise WAN, Internet) are causing quality issues.

It’s also very useful to be able to build reports showing the instantaneous demand on various portions of your network from the collaboration solution. This means knowing where the user is located (e.g., local IP address), when they joined and left each call, the call bandwidth, and what modality they were using (audio, video, content). While the vendor can provide this raw data, it’s unlikely that the vendor will compile the needed reports on instantaneous demand because this requires knowledge of your enterprise network structure. Spending time to create these reports is very helpful in sizing network links or in determining where Internet access points should be deployed across the enterprise.

User Feedback

Getting direct user feedback is invaluable in managing your user’s quality of experience. Tickets are one measure of user feedback. The vendor may provide an integrated user feedback mechanism, like a simple five-star rating input at the end of each call. Or perhaps they provide some simple problem-reporting templates that are automatically presented to users (e.g., audio was poor, could not see the other side, content sharing was slow to present, etc.).

Users have a much higher probability of providing provide feedback at the end of a call rather than a provider asking about their experience at a later time. If this information is tied to details of the call, then doing correlations on user complaints with location or network type or time-of-day can be very helpful in isolating and solving quality issues. This feedback can also let you know where more user training or support is needed.

Vendor Customer Success Support

Most cloud-based solution providers either have or are planning to have an internal customer success team, which ensures a contracted enterprise’s goals are being met and that they renew at the end of the service's current term. These teams can solve problems quickly and act as a conduit between the provider’s development team and the contracted enterprise to relay issues and feature requests. Large customers typically have a dedicated customer success team member assigned, and so a good relationship can be built at the working level between the enterprise and the vendor to ensure the solution is providing the needed services. I recommend an explicit assignment or process in your organization to leverage this resource and relationship.

Executive Sponsor

Assigning someone as an executive sponsor to focus on the progress of a transition plan and to promote new technology adoption might help transition users to a new service. The executive sponsor models the new approach an enterprise wants its users to adopt and pushes other parts of the organization to follow their example. Your sponsor plays a key role (along with the CIO) in engaging with the service provider management to encourage them to up their game, whether it be in terms of feature set, reliability, or analytics. The best sponsor is a business manager within the organization where the collaboration solution is integral to their business delivery, not just a part of the expected infrastructure of the organization.

Include your executive sponsor in periodic update meetings during the transition to ensure their buy-in on the solution and the process.

Also, connect your executive sponsor and your CIO with the appropriate levels of management within your chosen service provider. This executive connection is valuable for supporting problem escalations and for encouraging your provider to add capabilities that will benefit your organization. This feedback path is especially powerful if your executive sponsor is a business manager. Showing your provider a direct correlation between a requested feature and a business result will give them an incentive to include that feature as it helps the vendor increase their market opportunity.

Room Management

Office-based collaboration rooms, whether they are audio and content only or video-enabled, still need to be managed. Using your current approach is an option, but consider using a managed service provider (MSP) if you aren’t already doing so. An MSP should have more in-depth knowledge of the room equipment and be better able to actively monitor those systems, stay ahead of software upgrades, understand security vulnerabilities, and know-how to help users through on-the-spot issues better than an in-house team, just because that is their full-time job. If they are a large MSP, they will have automation solutions in place that can be much more cost-effective than an in-house manual approach.

Summary

Managing a cloud-based collaboration solution is about listening to your users, understanding their experience, diagnosing the technical challenges occurring either in-house, with the network service providers or with the cloud service, and then driving solutions to solve those issues. Use all your standard techniques of managing KPIs to know if you are on track, and leverage the analytics to see if long-term improvement is occurring.

]]>Team CollaborationMonitoring & ManagementOrganization & ManagementUnified Communications & CollaborationUser Adoption & Traininguser adoptionsite:License Global,nid:17053Thu, 19 Mar 2020 00:00:00 -0500John BartlettLicense GlobalNews &amp; Viewsenhttps://www.nojitter.com/team-collaboration/how-manage-cloud-collaboration-solution-effectively6 Best Practice Guidelines for Remote Work Programs https://www.nojitter.com/best-practices/6-best-practice-guidelines-remote-work-programs
Taking the lead from businesses such as Amazon, Apple, Google, JPMorgan, Microsoft, and Twitter, businesses all around the world are allowing, if not mandating, that employees work from home to help limit the spread of and ease concerns about coronavirus (COVID-19).

We expect many others to follow suit – even entire industries—such as education and healthcare—are expected to adopt this method. The situation is prompting companies to get acquainted with the best practices of efficient remote working and telecommuting.

Here’s a look at what you need to consider when supporting remote working:

# 1: Offer the Right Communications and Collaboration Tools

Various Frost & Sullivan surveys show that the primary challenge for adopting remote working strategies is the need to maintain effective communications and collaboration. Therefore, providing individuals with the right software and hardware tools is crucial to enable an efficient remote working environment.

A shift in workplace dynamics and rapid technology evolution has given rise to unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and a variety of cloud-based services. Today, companies have a long list of cloud-based telephony, meetings, and team collaboration services from which to choose from. Free versions of these tools are often available to accommodate businesses without the economic resources to license them or pre-deployment testing requirement the various tools among their employees.

Regarding video collaboration, changing demographics in the workplace, combined with technological advancements in terms of Internet connectivity, portability, and functionality, are making rich video-first interactions with individuals or groups as mainstream and ubiquitous as audio conversations.

Team collaboration services have also seen tremendous growth in recent years, with more users conducting a vast proportion of their teamwork within growing collaboration hubs such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex Teams, Slack, and Workplace by Facebook. While these tools are widely available and proliferating, Frost & Sullivan recommends that companies carefully evaluate them for use in supporting remote working. Factors to consider include:

Simplicity

Intuitiveness

Ease of use

Extensibility

Reliability

Security

Control

Interoperability

Speed of innovation

Of course, no software-based communications and collaboration service experience is complete without adequate endpoints. Businesses and organizations need to enhance their employees’ communication and collaboration experience by leveraging proper audio and video communications hardware endpoints such as IP desktop phones and PC USB UCC headsets, cameras, and speakers, among others. In this respect, home offices should be on par with or even better than offices to support an efficient and productive off-site working experience.

While the quality of communications and collaboration is paramount, businesses should also carefully evaluate device factors such as:

Durability

Reliability

Interoperability

Connectivity

Design

Form factor

Price

Feature set

Built-in product features, such as active noise canceling in UCC headsets or multi-connectivity capabilities in an endpoint, can certainly address various challenges in remote working environments. These include ambient noise control, the need to shift from one device to another, or the ability to enable call management control.

Frost & Sullivan strongly recommends that businesses extending their remote working capabilities to employees carefully select software and hardware communications and collaboration tools based on the different criteria stated above and the various objectives they wish to achieve.

# 2: Ask Workers for Their Opinion and Feedback

Many businesses and organizations that have successfully moved to remote working practices place the worker’s opinion and feedback at the center of the process. Across the years, the role of IT has evolved significantly. What was once the go-to place for any technology decisions has become more about risk, security, and governance. The part IT used to play — deciding and driving tech solutions to business problems — is now shared with line-of-business managers and even end users.

Mimicking the trend of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) is the revolution of bring-your-own software or application (BYOS or BYOA). With the rise of innovative cloud-based communications and collaboration services, more software is spreading through companies in bottom-up adoption patterns. An increasing array of user groups is demanding access to software communications and collaboration services that are helping them better perform their jobs.

As more millennials and digital natives start influencing workplace culture, companies are starting to beef up their BYOS and BYOA programs. That is especially true since organizations are now not only competing for business but also to attract and retain talent. Addressing the expectations of the changing demographics of the workforce in terms of work flexibility and tools used for work is key.

With the new ways of work, employees are no longer tied to their desks, judged by their presence in the office, and how late in the day they stay. Employees are working from everywhere, using their personal devices to join meetings, and collaborating on the fly with less structured, less formal meetings.

Newer generations prefer chat tools and video collaboration over voice. Today, cloud-based video and team collaboration services are being recognized as more efficient alternatives to traditional audioconferencing services.

What communications and collaboration tools can help you be more efficient?

Are we offering the right fit for you today?

How can we improve our business, in general, as well as our communications and collaboration capabilities?

Ultimately, the nature of communications and collaboration is about people and their ability to establish rapport, which then yields higher productivity.

#3: Enhance Your Corporate Information Resources

All companies wishing to extend their telecommuting capabilities should enrich their intranets, central knowledge bases, or wikis to provide individuals access to all materials necessary to perform their job tasks efficiently. Tools such as educational resources, company info, organizational charts, a list of frequently asked questions, company alerts, and other online resources are necessary to help in the daily job of telecommuters.

Remote workers, more than anyone else, want to feel informed. In this respect, companies and organizations need to provide all necessary information and resources, to empower their workers — and allow them to learn about the latest and greatest in the organization —without wasting time searching for information.

Enhancing corporate information resources also involves the practice of conducting continuous online courses and training that improve worker skills and knowledge about the job. Geography and location should never be a boundary when it comes to training and education.

#4: Make Them Feel Included

Because remote workers might feel isolated if not frequently engaging, it’s imperative to establish frequent and fulfilling communications with them. That is why many companies are investing time and resources in developing activities that promote individual/team engagement, individual/team recognition, and team bonding.

The result is a dynamic environment that advances employee engagement to similar or greater levels than in the physical workplace.

#5: Security is Paramount

Security concerns are the primary reason why some companies are still reluctant to adopt a remote working model. But the security solutions market has progressed substantially over the last several years. Advances in virtualized environments, multifactor authentication (MFA), and next-generation encryption have set the conditions required for the security solutions market to flourish. Essential security controls such as firewall/network address translation traversal, encryption, and IP VPN deployment options should be a strategic priority for the entire remote working program. The implementation of behavioral analytics can also help in detecting suspicious activity.

In addition to implementing the right security measures for remote working, deploying technologies that comply with different regulated environments and industries is important. Data sovereignty and privacy concerns have never been stronger. Regional legislation on data and privacy, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), all have different postures on how and what data are stored, as well as which data repositories and systems of record are controlling and transacting the data.

#6: Compliance and Management

Concrete compliance and management practices should also be put in place to set clear expectations for and outline rules governing remote work. Aspects such as setting up hours for employees to connect or be available, communicating clear work objectives, keeping project tracking records — e.g., electronic timekeeping system) — and complying with travel rules and cost requirements are some of the policies that companies and organizations should consider to more efficiently manage their remote office practices.

Conclusion

As the remote working model continues to gain momentum, companies and organizations can efficiently take advantage of remote working strategies to retain talent, access a larger labor pool, and achieve general cost savings, among other objectives. However, if implemented without the proper best practices, remote working could become a double-edged sword. Frost & Sullivan, therefore, highly recommends that companies and organizations seriously consider the above-mentioned best practices for a successful and thriving remote working implementation.

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]]><a href="/event-type/enterprise-connect" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Enterprise Connect</a>Best PracticesContact Center & Customer ExperienceDigital WorkplaceFuture of WorkMonitoring & ManagementTeam CollaborationCOVID-19remote worksite:License Global,nid:17049Tue, 17 Mar 2020 00:00:00 -0500Alaa SaayedLicense GlobalNews &amp; Viewsenhttps://www.nojitter.com/best-practices/6-best-practice-guidelines-remote-work-programsHow to Provide Full Compliance Coverage for Microsoft Teamshttps://www.nojitter.com/team-collaboration/how-provide-full-compliance-coverage-microsoft-teams
With end of life for Skype for Business Online set for July 2021 and enterprise adoption of Microsoft Teams continuing to grow, compliance teams must find a reliable way to record collaboration sessions. At the same time, financial institutions must address regulatory requirements focused on collaboration platforms. These include FINRA’s 2020 exam priorities in the U.S. and the FCA’s Senior Managers Regime in the U.K., each of which will require compliance personnel themselves to perform recordkeeping, supervision, and reporting of best-effort compliance monitoring.

Given the current need to leverage collaboration and remote working in an unprecedented way, firms and financial institutions should look for new ways to leverage Microsoft Teams while keeping up compliance and risk standards. Theta Lake’s AI-based compliance suite for Microsoft Teams scales compliance capabilities for the expanding scope and increasing volume of business communications that regulated companies must record, review, and be able to retrieve based on increasing regulatory requirements.

First, the Theta Lake solution provides full capture, archiving, and compliant recordkeeping of messages and all content shared within the Teams collaboration app. It is the only in-market solution that can cover both one-to-one and group chats to adhere with FINRA, SEC, and MiFID II recordkeeping requirements while providing a native, fully threaded viewer of Teams chat with built-in chat risk detection identification.

Third, compliance teams have access to an AI-assisted review space plus traditional search and eDiscovery capabilities. From this review space, they can run efficient searches through all communications in a native, fully threaded view. In addition, they can prioritize risk identification to streamline compliance and legal reviews as well as support integrations with enterprise data repositories that may require captured content.

]]>Team CollaborationBest PracticesMonitoring & ManagementPartner EcosystemSponsored PostVendor Newscompliancearchivingrecordkeepingsite:License Global,nid:17048Tue, 17 Mar 2020 00:00:00 -0500Anthony Cresci, Theta LakeLicense GlobalNews &amp; Viewsenhttps://www.nojitter.com/team-collaboration/how-provide-full-compliance-coverage-microsoft-teamsNetwork Automation: Commercial or Open Source?https://www.nojitter.com/systems-management-network-design/network-automation-commercial-or-open-source
In my last post, Automation Tools for Different Tasks, I discussed the differences in tasks that drive tool selection. But the array of options is confusing, with the question of whether to buy an expensive commercial product or build your own open-source solution being a big consideration. Is it better to buy an expensive commercial product or build your own solution around open source tools? What are the tradeoffs?

When doing your analysis, use a common operational framework – like my personal favorite, a model incorporating people, process, and technology (PPT) to drive action.

People

People are the most important component of the framework in that smart network engineers can overcome deficiencies in process and technology. They can determine which technology to implement, how best to deploy it (process), and which technology and processes aren’t effective in a situation or for a task.

Next, you’ll have to determine who will own the tool and what skills they have. You’ll need multiple tool owners so that your organization isn’t handicapped when someone is on vacation, takes sick leave, or resigns. The skills to implement an open-source solution will be quite different from those required to deploy a commercial product. Both approaches necessitate learning new paradigms, but the details and skills are very different.

Process

Well-defined processes make tasks easily repeatable, with consistent results guaranteed. If you’ve selected the right people for the job, they’ll be able to create great processes that turn marginal tools into amazing automation systems.

You’ll quickly appreciate a network based on standard building-block designs that make it easier to create processes that apply to more of the infrastructure. Leading organizations realize this and don’t take shortcuts in network design and implementation. Fewer design variations result in fewer and simpler processes. This, in turn, reduces the amount of time your staff must put toward creating and maintaining them.

Technology

Tools are like power amplifiers for the networking team - don’t expect one to be enough. Research tool performance for the tasks you need to automate. A system that can’t handle many devices in parallel might be unable to finish its work within your change window constraints. Also, look for systems in which network operations are capable of being daisy-chained. Be sure to include tools that can validate configuration changes to confirm they resulted in the desired operational state.

Commercial vs Open Source

Once you’ve evaluated your staff’s capabilities and the types of tasks (processes) that need implementing, and this will require additional evaluation criteria, it’s time to decide between commercial and open source.

Don’t try to do too much at once. Begin with an overall game plan, pick a few simple tasks to start with, select a product, and conduct a proof-of-concept (PoC) test. You can’t do this on more than one product or task at a time.

What is your implementation time? If your organization likes to see results quickly, you may benefit from choosing a commercial product, simply because of the time it takes to create or adapt open-source tools. On the other hand, if your organization is very cautious about network automation, a slow-roll process using open-source tools may be the right solution.

Commercial

Commercial configuration management tools are widely available, including vendor-specific options such as Cisco’s DNA-Center and Juniper’s Contrail. Cisco’s Network Services Orchestrator can handle multivendor networks, as can systems from companies like Gluware and Itential. These allow your existing network engineers to work with configuration snippets that they already know. Unimax has a great reputation for handling unified communications MACD functions. Many of these tools are easily integrated into existing processes and don’t require extensive re-education of the network staff. A PoC implementation with specific, measurable goals can help you evaluate potential products in a real-world scenario. Many products can achieve significant results within a few weeks of deployment.

You shouldn’t be put off by the cost of commercial products. Yes, they can seem expensive. But look at the cost of staff time to develop comparable systems using open-source tools. Two good developers will likely cost in excess of $300,000 per year for salary and benefits. You can buy a lot of commercial products for that much money per year.

A downside to commercial products is that you get what they produce. Include diagnostics and troubleshooting in the PoC so that you know what’s involved. Try to get a sense of whether your vendors are focused on releasing the next big feature instead of making the last feature truly useful.

Open Source

Open-source tools have proliferated in the past few years and it’s hard to avoid the mention of Ansible, Salt, NAPALM, pyATS, and Nornir. These tools provide the ultimate flexibility in functionality. They are applicable to any of the network automation tasks but are ideally suited for network validation and network troubleshooting tasks. Do note that you’ll need a source-of-truth database to drive the automation processes that determine whether the network is configured and functioning as you desire.

Expect a long delay between starting an open source-based automation project and achieving the result. Network teams seldom have software development expertise, so consider your staffing requirements, too. An alternative to in-house staffing is to use a consulting organization like networktoCode.comor Cypress Consulting to build solutions from open-source tools. They may have packages that can significantly reduce your time to deployment. Keep in mind, that some vendors have consulting teams that can aid in building custom solutions.

Summary

As with all things in networking, the right answer for your organization depends on several factors.

• What is your staff capable of handling? Do you have software developers available or can you hire contractors?

• What tasks do you need to accomplish (i.e., what are your goals)? Complex tasks will require more time to implement. Start with simple tasks and work up to the more complex.

You must decide where your organization is on the continuum from read-only tasks to CI/CD in order to select the appropriate tool for the task at hand. Each tool/technology has different strengths and weaknesses. It pays to spend the time to understand your requirements and identify the best tools for your needs.

Just as customer service (CX) makes all the difference in the contact center, user experience (UX) matters significantly in the collaboration space – where workers have a never-ending variety of applications and platforms to help them be more productive. For the most part, the underlying technologies work decently. But getting workers to adopt and then use them effectively long term is another story. That’s the crux for any of these offerings to have real success, which is why UX is so important.

A key challenge all collaboration players face is that IT, which typically signs off on a purchase, often thinks about use of these applications differently than the workers across the organization who need to use them daily. With IT’s guidance, UC engineers and developers wind up focusing on features that end users aren’t necessarily all that interested in. That often results in a usage gap, as clearly exists with UC, especially for mobile applications.

I recently got to wear my market researcher hat and conducted a series of focus groups on this very topic. A full report is coming soon, and while I can only be high level here, this study validated some realities that help explain why end-user adoption of mobile UC is so hard to achieve. No matter how remarkable the technology is, the real test is putting it into the hands of end users, and focus groups provide a front-row seat for observing just how well that goes.

Engineers Just Think They Know What Will Work

In the perfect world of an engineer, we would be all-knowing. There wouldn’t be a need to simplify things, and everything would precisely operate as envisioned. Since we live in a highly imperfect world, the real challenge comes from translating that vision into a great user experience. Nobody had a better understanding than Apple founder Steve Jobs, and at least when it comes to mobile apps for collaboration, his kind is sorely missed.

That isn’t to say that mobile UC apps aren’t well-designed — there’s a lot to like in terms of look and feel — but this particular use case faces challenges that the desktop environment doesn’t. A good starting point would be a form factor where the smaller screen on smartphones constrains how engaged workers are willing or able to get. On the other hand, the touchscreen makes some features easier to use than with a desktop user interface (UI), but that presumes end users know about the features in the first place or feel compelled to use them.

Another fundamental challenge is that most employees use their personal smartphones for business. BYOD is nothing new but managing both worlds on a single device isn’t easy, I heard from focus group participants. Perhaps if we only talked to tech-savvy Millennials, this wouldn’t be a problem, but at this point in time, they only represent one segment of the workforce.

Managing dual personas has been a selling point for many UC offerings, so this isn’t an unsolvable problem. However, even when that problem has a solid solution, a more recent twist of events is working against the best intentions of UC providers. The scourge of robocalling has spread from landlines to mobile devices, a pain point clearly identified in our sessions.

Most participants feel inclined to answer all incoming calls, even from unknown numbers, since they could well be for business. They end up wasting a lot of time and energy when those calls are scams received via their personal number. While solutions are in the works, they haven’t made it this far downstream yet. As such, the best intentions from engineers for UC are being undermined because the mobile telephony experience is becoming an adventure that nobody enjoys.

Getting to First Base Is the Hardest Part

Across our sessions, we asked participants to use various mobile UC&C features for different UC platforms (who shall remain nameless in this article), starting with basics like answering a call and progressing to more collaborative modes of working on a mobile device. In almost all cases, participants required assistance to find the features, and once located, they often needed a few tries to get it right. Engineers and developers don’t want to hear this, but it’s ultimately what keeps UX designers busy.

It’s easy to attribute this to a pool of people who are too old school, or not tech savvy enough to use mobile UC. But we had plenty of tech-savvy individuals, and more importantly, they aren’t strangers to collaboration tools. Many participants use platforms like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, and GoToMeeting, and concepts like presence or file sharing are familiar.

When conducting this type of market research, it’s difficult to know exactly what to expect — given how amorphous “collaboration” is. There is no singular way to collaborate, and people generally use the tools with which they’re most comfortable using. Again, this reiterates the importance of UX, and if mobile UC applications aren’t easier and more intuitive to use than what people are doing already, getting their buy-in is going to be an uphill struggle.

Engineers and developers can’t pick and choose their target user base. To varying degrees, all workers need to use some semblance of these tools, and in a multi-generational workforce, it’s a real challenge getting widespread UC adoption, especially for mobile. That brings us to a second reason why UX is so significant in this case — namely how mobile-centric everyone’s life has become. The desktop may offer a better overall UX for UC, but mobile is where much of their workday happens, so that’s where UC really needs to shine.

The good news is that once participants got the hang of using these features, they were comfortable with them — which holds true for most cases where new technology comes along, but it’s particularly relevant for mobility. When sitting at a desk, workers are stationary, both hands are free, the screen is bigger, and icons are easier to see and move around. Mobile environments are often the complete opposite, so applications need to work with minimal effort. That was not the case on the first take during the sessions, and without getting any external help, it’s easy to see how workers wouldn’t even get to first base with mobile UC apps.

Getting to Home Plate

As per the opening Yogi-ism, focus groups reveal a lot about how people engage with technology. Aside from how individuals use phones, their body language, facial expression, tone of voice, etc., tells a richer UX story. Add to that group dynamics where everyone is airing and sharing their grievances, and you take away a greater understanding of the gap between what gets built in the lab, and how it’s actually used in the field.

To be fair, Apple-style UX isn’t the panacea for making mobile UC ubiquitous. Whether the perfect UX here may only need a tiny tweak or a major re-do, it’s not the only factor driving better adoption. You can’t get to home plate without getting to first base, and as we saw during the groups, that means somehow executing some handholding at the outset.

Remember, these people are active mobile users, interested in having better tools to collaborate on their mobile devices. They only need to know these applications are available, receive a short demonstration on how to use them, - and then - hopefully – they’ll be on their way. I can’t say if the onus falls on the UC vendors or to IT for this, but without it, mobile UC adoption will remain low.

The more you listen to end users, the more you learn, and that’s why we conduct market research. Opening Day is just a few weeks away, so for now, every team is in first place. Over the course of a long season, staying on top comes from adjusting along the way — by listening and observing. Nobody knows better than end users what mobile UC apps are going to stick, and the vendors that pay heed to that have the best chance of getting from first to home and running up some big scores in the marketplace.

]]><a href="/event-type/enterprise-connect" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Enterprise Connect</a>Contact Center & Customer ExperienceAI & AutomationEndpointsMonitoring & ManagementTeam CollaborationUnified Communications & CollaborationMobile UCuser experienceMarket researchsite:License Global,nid:17031Tue, 10 Mar 2020 00:00:00 -0500Jon ArnoldLicense GlobalNews &amp; Viewsenhttps://www.nojitter.com/contact-center-customer-experience/getting-ux-right-starts-end-usersJourney of Becoming a Re-engaged Customerhttps://www.nojitter.com/contact-center-customer-experience/journey-becoming-re-engaged-customer
Every modern contact center company claims it’s in the business of customer engagement – where the voice of the customer is critical, and the end goal is to make customers appreciate the experience so much – they’ll continue to do business with the brand. Of course, the challenge for the contact center is a decreasing desire among customers to interact via the phone.

Customer “engagement” has always felt a bit aspirational to me. Just how much emotional involvement can there be in a typical business transaction? However, I recently had two experiences which left me feeling heard, engaged, and more loyal to the brands in question. I think it’s particularly noteworthy that both interactions took place over Twitter.

eBags

eBags is a web retailer that sells travel related bags and accessories. The company offers many leading brands as well their own branded products. I’ve been a loyal eBags customer for many years, purchasing various bags for family members and myself. When I finally wore out my well-traveled, well-liked, primary carry-on bag, I went onto the company website and ordered a replacement eBags carry-on.

Much to my chagrin, the bag that arrived was “new and improved.” Of course, improved is a relative term, and to me, this item wasn’t at all what I expected or wanted. Companies should be looking at ways to innovate their products, and perhaps a new customer would be perfectly happy with this “improved” bag. But as a veteran consumer I expected something different.

I tweeted my disappointment and tagged @eBags in my complaint. I do this often with different products, partially to see what happens. Sometimes I receive a polite reply or apology, but silence is the most common result. I had no desire to call customer service. That takes more time, and I already knew that I had the option to return the bag.

eBags responded and asked to engage in private, using Twitter direct messaging (DM). I engaged with customer service in a multiday conversation during which I detailed my disappointment, but I never spoke with anyone at eBags. I provided my order number in a DM, and that likely provided the eBags staff with critical details including what I ordered, order history, and shipping address. They proposed to replace my bag with a new, old-style one, and offered a limited set of color choices that they still had in stock. Within just a few days, I had my replacement bag. I also had a renewed sense of loyalty.

I love my new bag. It’s slightly better than my old one. I’m so happy with my interaction that I’ve shared this tale with several people, and now publicly in this post. I’ve essentially become a brand ambassador and will continue to purchase products from this innovative retailer. eBags managed to turn my disappointment into loyalty.

QuickenLoans

My QuickenLoans experience turned out to be a case of advanced technology doing too good of a job.

I had two interactions in progress with the company—a refinance I’d recently completed, and an inquiry into some new services. Typically, this is the most-desired customer-engagement situation for a company – a satisfied customer who is returning for more. However, it turns out that such a situation can cause some confusion. QuickenLoans bypasses complex interactive voice responses (IVRs) and instead attempts to auto-route prospects to the appropriate contact. In my case, this created a negative experience.

I called QuickenLoans with an inquiry related to the refinancing I had recently completed. The auto-routing service assumed I was calling about new services, so I was effectively routed to someone who couldn’t help me. To make matters worse, I was routed to that person’s voicemail. I left a detailed voicemail, and when she called back, I wasn’t available.

Several calls, multiple explanations, and a few days went by before I connected live to the wrong agent. When we finally connected, I chastised the agent for not responding to my questions left in the voicemail. We soon discovered the auto-routing issue, and she directed me to the right folks, and they quickly resolved my matter.

I tweeted my dissatisfaction, pointing out that the auto-routing caused frustration and delay. To its credit, QuickenLoans saw the tweet, registered my name and city, and cross-referenced me in its database to find my phone number. A customer service representative called me to apologize and learn more about the specifics of what took place to prevent this from reoccurring with others. I left that call so impressed that I tweeted my satisfaction, and expect to remain loyal to QuickenLoans. At the time of this writing, that tweet has more than 2,500 impressions.

Conclusions

Clearly, customers and prospects are tweeting about brands. Companies could have the opportunity to meet (or not) those individuals where they stand. While it’s not a big leap for marketing departments to track brand sentiment, it’s still early for organizations to monitor Twitter with empowered representatives who can act appropriately.

Both examples involve digital-first companies in traditional industries. I suspect that progressive “customer engagement” stories in luggage and mortgages aren’t that common.

In my eBags interaction, the company sent me a replacement bag without asking for a credit card. The team swiftly assessed and remedied the situation. Yes, I had aired my complaint, but I hadn’t called customer service — nor did I intend to. It corrected my journey before losing my loyalty.

Twitter is an effective channel to engage with customers — at least for me. For others, it might be Facebook. The list of possible channels is long and continues to grow, which creates an opportunity. Brands can either wait for customers to arrive in the designated queue during designated hours, or brands can meet their customers where they are. The latter option can boost CSAT and loyalty.

Most contact center solutions integrate with social networks such as Twitter, and companies should be about to route and track these interactions just like they do with calls. If customer engagement is the goal, then service departments need more than omnichannel support. They need strategies to engage across channels.